Shh! Every time you say that, Tekulo, a Mega Block dies. Now everyone repeat after me: "I do believe in Mega Blocks! I do! I do!"

As we know (or maybe we don't) I am the guy who can make a reference out of anything. I'm sure BZPower has many of those individuals. In fact, I and a friend have taken it as a habbit now to basically have every last line in our conversations as spin-offs of Les Miserables lyrics. It's deliciously fun, if not tiring over time. Alas, though, it is good to be in the mood for a movie and share in such enthusiasm. I haven't really been this positive about something in a while.

Actually, I remember those old LEGO discussions, back when this board was dominated by the biannual meltdown that coincided with the revelation of the new toyline, for which I was a skeptic who had definite opinions about Mata colors vs. Metru colors, and action functions over posing. Boy, I put up a tough, grizzly offense against people who accepted the new toy line and thought that real fans liked the 2001-2003 stuff.

That is, of course, an overstatement and somewhat of a parody of my views, but I'm not about to go back and reread every last post of mine to chronicle with specificity the precise complixations that marked my development from the bonesiii hater I was to the bonesiii lover I am today. What I can say was that I learned to embrace the debate terms guide sooner rather than later, something I now consider to be a blessing, and came to respect other peoples' tastes, although I still campained for what I thought was desirable and hoped that through my enthusiasm I could get other people within the fanbase to be open to gear functions, loose Kanohi, smaller sets, and other things having to do with the appeal of 2001-2003.

I even remember giving sets in-depth reviews and trying to outdo the official ones on the front page. Those were good days, and my blog got some interesting use, but at the end of the day none of those reviews gathered any attention. Still, I can claim to have some actual Bionicle stuff that feels like BZP was back in the day. Those were good times. Truth be told, I even enjoyed the regular activity, the hecticness of it all. It was like living in New York without actually having to live in New York. There was always something to debate about and always a good laugh to be had over how different we all were, and although I'm beginning to forget them, I miss old personalities such as Adventurer, Graviton, Snoopy82, Turakii: #1 Lava Surfer, Bioni-Cool Jack, and the immortal T-Hybrid, who was actually active when I first joined. There was also EmperorWhenua, who was actually a regular friend of mine but has since refused to really talk with me anymore.

Man, things have changed. People blog about different stuff. There are those who, having lost reason to discuss Bionicle, now fall back to spammy, self-indulgent random fetter, where the casual joke is now the norm. Perhaps it was always that way, although I haven't been a long-time resident of the blogosphere. Yet, things seem less meaningful now. I still hold my goal of being a visionary writer and essayist on my blog and to keep the focus on things real and relevant, or at least something worth reading, but that gets more difficult these days. I lag. I fall behind. I'm no longer sure what my identity on these forums is. People consider me intelligent, but I'm afraid of disappointing them and losing credibility as the person who can consistently put out a good, insightful piece of reading material, so in my hesitance I instead do nothing.

There are some good things, though. I have new friends who try hard to write. I've found my community. It's different and it's not quite what it was back in my more newbish days when I was a child on BZP. Heck, nothing will ever be the same as that. I'm an adult now. However, that's no reason to discard what I have now. Just because it isn't magical, doesn't mean it's good. I just wish we could talk more regularly about Bionicle as something that was still happening and not as a something set in stone, this stone we call the past.

If Bionicle came back, that would be great. I just wish there was something in LEGO that truly got this site going again. I mean, when we were a Bionicle fansight when Bionicle was still on the shelves, that was by definition our glory days. Now we represent a memory, not a current reality. We're stuck in the past, no longer held up by the zeal of something new and the mystery of what might come next. Our story has been told. Now people come back either to put in two cents about what they missed or because they just plain loved the community. As much as I miss them, I almost envy those people who managed to move on, like T-Hybrid, who has now married and managed to improve his life, by his own account.

Well, I will still be hanging around. Why shouldn't I? You guys are the only people I even remotely suspect of actually reading my massive walls of text. The internet doesn't have anywhere else for me, so I come here. In the future, though, I will take the path of T-Hybrid, and I will have good memories of BZP, but it will have to be a stage that one day will have to end in order for the next to come. Meanwhile, I hope for the sake of this site's soul that there becomes something in LEGO that unifies the community in the same way Bionicle did, in a way that's magical and endearing, that gives the site the same incredible bond it did once before.